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does europe not have terrain for a big hoover-dam sized hydro-electric dam? Somewhere in Austria/southern germany there has to be the terrain to make one, surely?
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Nov 24, 2014 10:52
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double nine posted:does europe not have terrain for a big hoover-dam sized hydro-electric dam? Somewhere in Austria/southern germany there has to be the terrain to make one, surely? All the large rivers already have a ton of dams. Small rivers in valleys can still be converted to dams, but at incredible ecological cost by changing the water regime and turning remaining alluvial habitats into poo poo. We should not be expanding hydro in large parts of Europe.
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Nov 24, 2014 11:02
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Trabisnikof posted:I've yet to be convinced that wave power will ever be economic and meet environmental standards at the same time. It's a shame maintaining industrial equipment underwater is such a challenge, it seems so elegant to install some turbines in an ocean current. Seems at least part of the problem is that most companies are just taking metal ground based designs and dealing with the higher costs of working and constant corrosion in the ocean. If there is less structural support required in the water, wouldn't there be potential in approaching the challenge with lighter materials that don't inherently dissolve in salt water?
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Nov 24, 2014 12:53
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double nine posted:does europe not have terrain for a big hoover-dam sized hydro-electric dam? Somewhere in Austria/southern germany there has to be the terrain to make one, surely? Hydro power is deceptively awful for the environment. You lose the area's natural conditions, which in some cases is a travesty (Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite was a particularly wonderful environment lost in the 30s). You also introduce great risks to industry and population centers, because dam failures, while relatively uncommon, have incredible consequences. Some of my work has involved looking into how well a nuclear power plant survives an upstream dam failure. The site I looked at was relatively lucky, shunted off the main river with a canal and protected by a well-situated hill. I won't make the argument that hydro is worse than coal, just that it should not be a desirable form of power construction anymore. A failure at 3 Gorges is a lot scarier than a nuclear plant meltdown.
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Nov 24, 2014 14:31
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:It's a shame maintaining industrial equipment underwater is such a challenge, it seems so elegant to install some turbines in an ocean current.
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Nov 24, 2014 14:38
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Is there a good, semi-objective breakdown of solar PV vs solar thermal as a power plant design somewhere? Google gives me nothing but advice for home builders.
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Nov 24, 2014 15:03
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Pander posted:Hydro power is deceptively awful for the environment. You lose the area's natural conditions, which in some cases is a travesty (Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite was a particularly wonderful environment lost in the 30s). You also introduce great risks to industry and population centers, because dam failures, while relatively uncommon, have incredible consequences. Those risks to industry and population centers aren't just from outright dam failure. The people pointing out Hoover Dam as an area-wide panacea, take a look at this pic I took:  Floating by Phanatic, on FlickrThat's back in 2009. The water levels have continued to drop, and are at their lowest since the dam was built. The cities and farming that were a direct result of building the dam in the first place are in jeopardy of losing their water. If it drops 80 more feet, the pipes that extract water for Las Vegas will go dry, so they're building a billion-dollar expansion to be able to tap water from lower down. But if the level declines to 900 feet, then Arizona, California, and New Mexico don't get *any* water from the dam. Lake Mead gets fed from Lake Powell, which is also low. Hoover Dam's capacity is already down by about 25% because of the lower water levels. Dams are pretty lovely for the environment: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5617/
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Nov 24, 2014 15:22
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holy poo poo. What happened, increased water consumption, change in rainfall, supplying river changed course?
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Nov 24, 2014 15:56
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Phanatic posted:Those risks to industry and population centers aren't just from outright dam failure. Can't we just blame LA for this?
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Nov 24, 2014 15:57
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double nine posted:holy poo poo. What happened, increased water consumption, change in rainfall, supplying river changed course? Drought and increased usage if I had to guess. You see that all around the West.  Lucky Peak Reservoir, in Boise Idaho (not a hydroelectric plant IIRC but still).
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Nov 24, 2014 16:00
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double nine posted:holy poo poo. What happened, increased water consumption, change in rainfall, supplying river changed course? 15 years of drought coupled with induced demand. Hey, look at that, we build this steady reliable water supply for the southwest to spur development, and then the increased development resulted in a water shortage!
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Nov 24, 2014 16:03
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To a lesser extent air-conditioning, refrigeration and electricity also allow large populations to live in hot places. I think PBS or NPR had something about AC helping Reagan win.
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Nov 24, 2014 16:49
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Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass.
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Nov 24, 2014 17:41
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass. California should probably do a lot of things. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-drought-california-couple-in-trouble-for-not-watering-lawn/ quote:Michael and Laura Korte felt they were answering Gov. Jerry Brown's urgent call to turn off the tap.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:13
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass. If California stopped growing almonds they could triple residential use. Not even a joke.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:14
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Phanatic posted:California should probably do a lot of things. Yeah I was trying to google the percentage of water used on lawn care and found that, stupid.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:17
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Elotana posted:Is there a good, semi-objective breakdown of solar PV vs solar thermal as a power plant design somewhere? Google gives me nothing but advice for home builders. Physics for Future Presidents and (written later) Energy for Future Presidents are two good books with a nice breakdown of what's currently going on with solar PV vs solar thermal. The breakdown is that solar thermal really has nowhere to go as far as driving down cost, so if you want to go to 100% solar thermal for US power then you're pretty much forever doomed to paving over the entire state of Texas in order to do so. Solar PV sees yearly incremental improvements in efficiency, so there's a chance that scientists and engineers will eventually produce something that is cost effective enough to use on a large scale and that can offset some of our carbon usage. But right now natural gas is becoming king of electricity production and there's nothing that solar PV or solar thermal can do about it without huge subsidies.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:17
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QuarkJets posted:Physics for Future Presidents and (written later) Energy for Future Presidents are two good books with a nice breakdown of what's currently going on with solar PV vs solar thermal. From one cheap energy sources (Coal) to another cheap energy source (Gas). The cycle continues.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:18
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^^^ Thanks, Capitalism!Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah I was trying to google the percentage of water used on lawn care and found that, stupid. The best part is that this can happen pretty much anywhere thanks to homeowners associations. I hope you didn't want to replace your expensive green grass lawn with something more suited to the arid environment in which we live, because I don't like anything that's not grass and I've convinced the other members of the board to place a lien on your house until you waste as much water as the rest of us
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Nov 24, 2014 18:21
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QuarkJets posted:^^^ Thanks, Capitalism! Almost all the arguments I heard against nuclear that are not from the Greenies involve how 'expensive' nuclear is. Because using cheap dirty energy has done wonders for us.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:26
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass. Residential use of water basically amounts to nothing. Even in the most wasteful areas people are using on average about 550 gallons a day. A golf course in an arid environment typically uses 650,000 gallons per day. I mean of course limiting waste is good, but we tend to focus on things like this and miss the forest. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah I was trying to google the percentage of water used on lawn care and found that, stupid. It's ultra tiny, residential use is a drop in the bucket of total use and even in the hottest months lawn care is probably less than 10% of the households water use. Don't get me wrong, having meticulous lawns in areas that are near deserts is stupid, it just doesn't have nearly the effect people think it does.
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Nov 24, 2014 19:56
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Water and energy is such an interesting discussion to me because quality and quantity of use really matters. You can have a process that consumes less water, but if withdraws quality water and degrades it, well that low consumption number starts being less meaningful. Then add the layered complexities of the geographic nature of energy and the varied life cycles of different energy sources and there is a lot of nuance to be had. There's that sweet graph of water consumption at the power plant I'll edit this post and add which is one huge variable among many. edit:  This is of course consumption and doesn't include any loss of quality to water withdrawn and released (e.g. once-through cooling loops). Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 20:06
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tsa posted:Residential use of water basically amounts to nothing. Even in the most wasteful areas people are using on average about 550 gallons a day. A golf course in an arid environment typically uses 650,000 gallons per day. I mean of course limiting waste is good, but we tend to focus on things like this and miss the forest. Do you have sources for this stuff? It's not that I don't believe you, but I was curious myself what the breakdown was and couldn't find good data. I found this one report from 2006 and that's really it. http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cep/ep_706ehep.pdf (I...would hope that there are more than one thousand people per golf course in California but I guess I can't really know that.)
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Nov 24, 2014 20:10
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Do you have sources for this stuff? It's not that I don't believe you, but I was curious myself what the breakdown was and couldn't find good data. I found this one report from 2006 and that's really it. http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cep/ep_706ehep.pdf Well since we're talking about desert golf courses in California, I went to the Coachella Valley Water District's website and found this info. They're the Water District for quote:The Coachella Valley is home to more than 120 golf courses, most of which are located within CVWD’s service boundaries. The average golf course uses about 850 acre-feet of per year to maintain its greens and adjacent landscaping. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 20:14
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Sure: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-california-water-20141106-story.html Average water use is certainly less than 600 gallons a day, and my 10% figure was just a back of the envelope thing, but I would be surprised if lawn care was more than 15% of the household's total use during the hottest months. Golf course water use varies by location and weather, but during hot months at least 200k a day seems reasonable. Regardless the point wasn't even necessarily about how wasteful golf is but rather how low residential use is compared to commercial.
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Nov 24, 2014 21:06
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tsa posted:Sure: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-california-water-20141106-story.html Using the numbers I quoted above and the number for CVWD in the article you linked it looks like in the desert a golf course in CA uses the same water as ~2,000 people in the same area. However, an increasing number of golf courses are using non-potable water.
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Nov 24, 2014 21:12
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Yeah, golf courses are pretty atrocious when it comes to water conservation. It's kind of insane that California is still allowing so many golf courses to keep consuming so much water, despite long-standing drought conditions
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Nov 25, 2014 06:50
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Energiewende and the decision to abandon nuclear continues to be a rousing success for Germany: it has now been reduced to begging Sweden to keep its coal mines open so the country doesn't start experiencing blackouts. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5061a3e6-7347-11e4-907b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3JzrfzYYq quote:Germany has made a dramatic appeal to Sweden to help it out of an energy dilemma that threatens Europe’s biggest economy as it shifts away from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable energy.
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Nov 25, 2014 10:55
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LemonDrizzle posted:Energiewende and the decision to abandon nuclear continues to be a rousing success for Germany: it has now been reduced to begging Sweden to keep its coal mines open so the country doesn't start experiencing blackouts.
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Nov 25, 2014 12:49
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Maybe the "divestment" strategy is some sort of Enron game in which the assets are spun off into a shell company but nothing actually changes.
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, golf courses are pretty atrocious when it comes to water conservation. It's kind of insane that California is still allowing so many golf courses to keep consuming so much water, despite long-standing drought conditions What really got my goat was watching the Open Tournament and seeing an actual Scottish Highland golf course, and realizing that it was far more water efficient because they hadn't replaced every obstacle and plant scrub with super short grass just so that it'd be easier to play. These super boring and water-wasting fields are completely optional to the game of golf.
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Nov 25, 2014 19:02
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LemonDrizzle posted:Energiewende and the decision to abandon nuclear continues to be a rousing success for Germany: it has now been reduced to begging Sweden to keep its coal mines open so the country doesn't start experiencing blackouts. Oh Germany, keep on doin' that thing you do 
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Nov 25, 2014 19:07
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CommieGIR posted:Oh Germany, keep on doin' that thing you do My country is dumb and deserves a kick in the nuts. Looks like we're about to do that ourselves
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Nov 25, 2014 19:12
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How's Japan doing? Didn't they also try the ocean wave thing? Are they still not using land that has less atoms than some places?
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Nov 25, 2014 19:52
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Is this making people turn away from the Greens, any?
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Nov 26, 2014 00:21
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Pretty decent article cheer-leading nuclear development in the US: http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/backtothefuture Basic argument is that the US government is going to need to make real investments to get better nuclear technology actually going, and to a lesser extent the regulatory system needs to actually made to function again. (This article's favorite example is requirements for pressure containment... on reactor designs that don't hold anything dangerous under pressure at all.)
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Dec 17, 2014 22:15
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crazypenguin posted:Pretty decent article cheer-leading nuclear development in the US: Supposedly the NRC and DoE have reached an agreement to open up spent fuel storage access, we may be able to raise the cap on the number of active reactors the US can operate.
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Dec 17, 2014 22:49
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crazypenguin posted:Pretty decent article cheer-leading nuclear development in the US: In this design there's no cladding to hold in your gaseous fission products in the event of a leak or vessel rupture. It won't need nearly as much pressure rating as a traditional LWR containment, but you still need some level of air-tight containment regardless of the RCS operating pressure.
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Dec 17, 2014 23:08
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So a paper arguing that nuclear power is an effective way to combat climate change got published and the authors followed up with an open letter with a bunch of conservation prof signatures arguing for actually using it more. The Ecologist, Setting the Environmental Agenda since 1970 (according to itself) managed to stop whining about GMOs for a second to put up a pair of anti nuclear articles seriously citing the Chernobyl Killed Millions of Russians "study" and finding that a nuclear winter sure wouldn't be biodiversity friendly (checkmate nucular shills)  .Good god, idiots in the green movement will be the final nail in the coffin for my faith in humanity and turn me into a FYGM coal shill because hey I might as well make mad bank and enjoy myself while the world burns 
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Dec 21, 2014 23:55
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blowfish posted:So a paper arguing that nuclear power is an effective way to combat climate change got published and the authors followed up with an open letter with a bunch of conservation prof signatures arguing for actually using it more. If that ends up happening, you certainly picked the right country to live in!  fake edit: How much influence does The Ecologist have over politicians, businesspeople, scientists, and environmentalists? Is this a publication by and for crackpots, or do these articles have reach?
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Dec 22, 2014 04:44
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Hedera Helix posted:If that ends up happening, you certainly picked the right country to live in! Unclear. You never know which influential people might be influenced by crackpot sources.
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Dec 22, 2014 04:52
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